No Country for Old Books

Have we turned so many pages that we’ve stopped thinking?

“If only my heart were stone.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

A few days ago I came across a one-star review of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. The reviewer called it slow, heavy, confusing, and flat. No twists. No thrills. No real characters. No emotions. Trust me: I had to read the review twice.
Now, I’m a McCarthy fan, but whether you like his work or not, calling Blood Meridian a bad novel is like calling Led Zeppelin boring because the songs are too long and don’t get to the hook fast enough.
It’s not about taste, it’s about expectations… or habits. Or I dunno what else.
Okay, I know that for the past twenty years or so, “page-turners” have taken over all the shelves. You know, the ones with tight plots, short chapters, snappy dialogue, big twists every 20 pages. Easy to read, quick to consume, efficient. Yeah, efficient. Often, the kind of book you read in a weekend and forget by Monday. Meanwhile, “page thinker” novels—books that make you stop, re-read, question, sit with the discomfort, or even feel lost—have quietly slid out of focus. Not because they stopped being written, but because we’ve trained ourselves to stop reading them: too slow, too hard, too much work. One star.

Prada desert store, by Tim Trad

So what should a writer do?

Let’s face it: writing today feels like walking a tightrope between art and algorithm. You want to write something meaningful, but readers expect a hook on page one. So where does that leave the writer who wants to build something slow, complex, maybe even a little messy? Someone who wants to take risks, stretch a sentence, linger on a description? Should we all start writing like screenwriters? Should we all just write cinematic prose for imaginary Netflix adaptations? I mean, plot over prose, dialog over description, perfect arcs, protagonists with enough backstory to fill a wiki, and with a photo book stolen from a hit TV show. Or is there still room for the novel that dares to meander? That breaks the rhythm, that doesn’t care if you like the characters, that makes you work—and only rewards you if you do?

It’s a kind of balance

I think great, “old” novels used to do both: they pulled you forward while holding you back; they gave you a story but made you earn it; they let you sit with uncertainty and with slow-burning truths. They got you with silence, not just with the noise of constant emotional spikes. Because not everything that sticks in your memory comes from a twist, some truths come in quietly. Some beauty needs space to unfold. And not every good book is “unputdownable,” some are “putdownable” in the best possible way: you put them down just to think.

Are we losing thinking readers?

I have no idea, but that bad review of Blood Meridian was a gut punch. Do we read to escape or to understand? To be entertained or to be transformed? Maybe both. Probably both. And we need both. I need both. That’s all I know, and my fear is that we’re gonna lose something important to chase the damn publishing market.